Travels with rarecat: West Iceland

We boarded our much anticipated boat cruise to see Icelandic bird life at the seaside town of Stiksholmer. It was a perfect day for a cruise - warm and sunny and the scenery in Breiðafjörður Bay was enchanting. We also got to savour the fruits of the sea while on the boat - fresh scallops and sea urchins were taken straight from the sea and onto our shell plates. They were delicious even though the salt water that came with them could still be tasted. The next post will be dedicated exclusively to the wildlife encountered on the cruise.

After lunch in Stiksholmer, the fog has rolled in and our drive through the Snaefellsness Peninsula was disappointing because we couldn't see too much. The famous Kirkjüfell Mountain, that was on many an iconic photo of Iceland, was half obscured by fog. So I didn't bother making the trek to the waterfall in the drizzle to attempt to take that iconic photo. I did take photos of the mountain and the waterfall separately - maybe I can do a collage...;-)

Those are the breaks when travelling on a schedule. It is not the first time that we didn't see what we hoped to see on a trip - life is not perfect afterall. But there are a lot more to a trip than one missed view. We also had many glimpses of a large glacier while on the road, sometimes on the left side of the road, sometimes on the right side depending on which way the road turns. Photographers were trying to take pictures of it from the bus window. The irony of it is that when we got back to the hotel, we looked across the road, and there was the Langjökull Glacier in full view!

We had spent the night in the small town of Bifrost at a hotel that used to be part of the University of Bifrost. The rooms here are housekeeping rooms with a kitchenette - not that we needed to use it as our dinners were included. As it turned out the buffet dinner was superb, with an executive chef supervising the buffet to ensure the everything is fresh and hot, almost like a served dinner. The cured salmon was the highlight for me as were the fresh salmon and cod served with pine nuts and herbs.

The hotel was just beside the married quarters of the University which seemed to be built on a lava field. The backyards of these townhouses and apartments, including the children's playground consisted of lava rocks! The following day, we hiked up the crater that was beside the hotel and saw that there were two craters in the area. So we had slept beside a volcano... I subsequently found out that was the Grabrok crater, an old crater that erupted 3400 years ago.